


The Inheritor

by thingsbaker



Series: Dissolution [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-14
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 20:02:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3741859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingsbaker/pseuds/thingsbaker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But no: no, Sherlock, even this pale, resurrected, somehow humbled form of him, would not come by simply as a courtesy, and he would not be nervous if he were here to deliver a told-you-so.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Inheritor

**Author's Note:**

> This was all written before Season 2, sometime in 2011. This is an epilogue and companion piece to Dissolution; it doesn't make much sense without reading that first.

The knock comes at four a.m. Mycroft has only just had his first cup of tea. He waves off the polite, curious look of his newest housekeeper and goes downstairs to answer the door himself. He has not done this in at least three years.  
  
Sherlock is standing there, as Mycroft knew he would be. He’s been tracking John Watson’s movements since the one-year anniversary of Sherlock’s death and since Interpol alerted him that someone using Sherlock’s old passport had tried, that day, to cross the border from Switzerland into Germany. It had taken him exactly forty-five seconds to come to the conclusion that his brother was still alive when Dr. Watson had left abruptly for Rome two weeks ago; the puzzle as to why Sherlock had pretended not to be for a year and five months was one Mycroft was still trying to work on.  
  
The answer will come tonight. Mycroft holds the door open and says, “Do come in.”  
  
Sherlock has been to his house many times, of course. They’ve had holiday celebrations here; they’ve had tea; Sherlock even used to come by during his uni days – when Mycroft was still living on a single, rented floor of this immense building he now owns outright – to lie on Mycroft’s couch and talk through his current experiments. Mycroft still regrets that he had, at some point, lacked the time and inclination to continue those brief, friendly meetings with his younger brother. If he had continued, the entire drugs problem might have been avoided or at least contained. Sherlock has always had a strong will, though, and Mycroft doesn’t believe he was wrong to suggest, once upon a time, that they would both need friends outside of each other if they were to thrive in this world.  
  
They have quarreled here, as well. Today will not be one of these days, though Mycroft is so angry as to feel unreasonable. Their last quarrel was the night before Sherlock’s departure for the continent, shortly before his death. He had stood in Mycroft’s study and outlined exactly how much trouble he was in this time – though he’d said it in a voice of triumph. Forty-five men to be arrested, he’d crowed; Moriarty to be brought low by the London Metropolitan police, with Sherlock’s silent hand in the background. It had been Mycroft who had insisted his brother consider his own personal safety, Mycroft who had called for a physician to bandage his mugger-broken fingers, Mycroft who had said, “You cannot simply go alone and expect to be safe.”  
  
Now Sherlock, who wasn’t safe, who isn’t ever safe, is standing in his front parlor, a bit too close to the fire, his back turned as Mycroft follows him into the room. “Brandy?” Mycroft suggests.  
  
Sherlock turns. “When did you know?”  
  
He takes a moment to catalogue the physical changes. Thinner; a fine scar above his eyebrow; a few white hairs. His coat is not the same one he left with; it is a rather shabby replacement of German origin. His shoes have thin soles. His lips are chapped. He has been back in London for three days and has yet to see a barber, a tailor, or a doctor beyond John Watson. He has, at least, had a few good meals, though from the looks of it, too much good food too quickly has made him ill.  
  
“For certain? I knew you were alive when your card arrived for John. I began to suspect when your passport turned up.”  
  
Sherlock nods. “That was intended for you.”  
  
There is something different, too, in his tone. It is cautious. Mycroft imitates it. “I did, of course, make inquiries, but you were most discreet.”  
  
“I will take that as a compliment.” He nods when Mycroft lifts the bottle. “I expected your men on my doorstep nearly every day.”  
  
“A compliment repaid.” Mycroft pours them both shallow glasses of his best. “Well, to your return, then.”  
  
Sherlock takes the glass and stares at it, then swallows some and makes a face. “Good god, you have got wealthy, haven’t you?”  
  
“Mm.”  
  
He clears his throat, and it’s somehow shocking – almost too intimate – for Mycroft to realize his brother is nervous. He wonders what he is there for. For Mycroft’s own sake, there can be only one reason – to let him know he is alive, to let him know, perhaps, that it is in spite of, not because of, the many obstacles (“precautions, Sherlock,”) that Mycroft has set in the path between death and his younger brother. But no: no, Sherlock, even this pale, resurrected, somehow humbled form of him, would not come by simply as a courtesy, and he would not be nervous if he were here to deliver a told-you-so.  
  
The silence continues. Mycroft rings the bell and requests two dry muffins and two cups of tea. The housekeeper nods and disappears.  
  
“You were in Turkey.”  
  
“For some of the time, yes,” Sherlock says. “I’ve been meaning to replace the boots.”  
  
“You would do well to do so.” He does not say what is obvious: he will happily buy them replacements. Sherlock need only ask. Mycroft takes a seat in his oldest wingback chair, one that faces the fire. It takes nothing from him to sit while his brother stands; he has no fear of the man.  
  
Sherlock paces a few steps, then a few more back. “You were there. Near the falls.”  
  
“I was.”  
  
“You saw his body.”  
  
“I did.” Mycroft tips his head. “Did you?”  
  
“No,” he says. “Not after. During, of course.”  
  
“You watched him die.”  
  
“I nearly watched us both.”  
  
Mycroft nods. He’s wondered how close a thing this was. He has hoped it was a near thing for the past two weeks, but now he finds even that is not explanation enough. “Where did you go?”  
  
“Downstream,” Sherlock says, and then he falls into the couch with a harsh laugh. “Far. I was – it was almost out of time, Mycroft. It was days.”  
  
“And then?”  
  
“Luck,” he says. He rubs his hands together. When the tea and muffins arrive, he glares at the housekeeper. She is unruffled. Mycroft may keep her yet.  
  
“Do eat,” he says, and pours two more drinks. Sherlock takes the brandy, then the tea. He holds his cup in both hands and takes a noisy first gulp, something he was cured of as a child.  
  
“Why did you stay away?”  
  
He shrugs. “Necessity, at first. He has a second in command. Dreadful fellow. You’d like him. Very efficient, nearly ruthless.”  
  
Mycroft barely smiles. “Is he for hire?”  
  
“At the moment, no,” Sherlock says, and shares his own slim grin.  
  
“Nor ever again.”  
  
“I would hardly admit that to a  _minor_  member of the government,” Sherlock says. He sets the tea back onto the side table, and Mycroft realizes that his real purpose is at hand.  
  
“What have you come for?” he asks.  
  
“Father’s ring,” Sherlock says.  
  
This is a surprise. And Mycroft is never surprised. Perplexed, puzzled, even curious, certainly, but a real surprise – and from his own brother – is unusual.  
  
“Ah,” he says. He doesn’t have a better response at hand. He’s never been certain that Sherlock even knew he’d kept their father’s wedding ring. Certainly, he’d known it had gone to their mother after Father’s death, and probably he had deduced that, at her death last year, while Sherlock was absent, both rings had gone somewhere. As it had been Mycroft who’d dealt with the bequests, of course Sherlock would have known that the property was once in his hands. Yet Mycroft had sold or distributed to far-flung family nearly everything of sentimental value quite promptly. It would have made sense if the rings – both of sterling silver, neither inscribed nor even particularly unique – had also been dispensed with.  
  
But Mycroft had kept them, both, in a small, black, velvet-lined box in his private reading room. He had no plans for them, no future purposes, but he had kept them nonetheless, feeling it was the thing that was done. He had never imagined that he would find a good use for them; he had even less supposed that Sherlock would, though during the drugs era, they might have been easily pawned.  
  
Now he looks at his brother across the room, and he remembers that last night, that last fight, the last time he saw him before he had died. “You cannot simply go alone and expect to be safe,” Mycroft had said, and Sherlock, pacing, wild-eyed, had stopped as suddenly as if he’d hit a wall.  
  
“No,” he’d said, “but he’ll never agree to go with me now.”  
  
Mycroft hadn’t even been thinking of John Watson that night. He’d been trying to talk Sherlock out of his escape plan altogether, feeling it very likely that Moriarty would not fall so quickly and so easily, that he might rise above the practical and strike hard in a personal way. That his brother’s thoughts had turned to him so quickly – so automatically – had told Mycroft something for certain that he’d wondered only idly before that.  
  
His brother was in love.  
  
And still is.  
  
“Do you think this will convince him?” Mycroft asks.  
  
Sherlock shakes his head. “Nothing will,” he says. “Nothing. I’ve done that in, I think. But he – needs something more. Some sign. I am still incapable of most things that he wants, but I can do this.” He looks up at Mycroft.  
  
Mycroft thinks for a moment. “Do you understand what it will mean to him?”  
  
“God, I hope so,” he says. “I want to, Mycroft,” he murmurs. “More than I ever have, I want to understand.”  
  
“Ah. Well, then.”  
  
Mycroft rises. The brandy is a warm pool in his belly, nothing more. He doesn’t ring to let the housekeeper know his whereabouts, just strides down the hall, certain that Sherlock will follow. He unlocks his study and holds the door, directs his brother to the high shelf where the rings are kept. Sherlock nods and takes a stepladder to reach; he pulls down the wooden case and sets it on the desk. The box is an antique of their grandfather’s, a man Sherlock never met and Mycroft hardly remembers beyond a smell and a flash of too-large hands. He was by all reports a great man.  
  
Sherlock opens the case. “The velvet box,” Mycroft says from the doorway, though he knows what must have caught his brother’s eye. The box itself is in the bottom of the collection: on top of it, there lie two other relics that Mycroft has not been able to part with, for reasons he has never been able to explain. Sherlock’s muddy, purple scarf, and a fine, antique, and very valuable Mont Blanc fountain pen, found on the ground near the Reichenbach Falls. It is undoubtedly the instrument that Sherlock used to write his final missive to John; it is the graduation gift that Mycroft himself gave his brother when he left university.  
  
Sherlock holds it for a moment that is too long. Mycroft shifts. “You may have anything you want,” he says. After all, Mycroft doesn’t need a souvenir of his brother anymore; he has the man himself again. It should be enough.  
  
Yet as he stands and watches Sherlock hold the pen, as he thinks of how easily it could disappear into his pocket, out of Mycroft’s house and life, he feels again the great bubbling anger that had threatened that morning, and under it, a trickle of the dread he’d once felt, standing in John Watson’s cramped flat and telling him that he believed his brother was lost.  
  
Sherlock looks back at him, and it’s very clear he can read this on Mycroft’s face. He sets the pen back down and lifts the scarf. “My favorite,” he says, and wraps it around his neck. He lifts the ring box and extracts their father’s band, then briefly touches Mummy’s ring before closing the box. He doesn’t return it to the case, though; he carries it to Mycroft. They stand together in the doorway.  
  
“You should find someone for this,” Sherlock says, and he sets the ring box in Mycroft’s hand. Mycroft tuts. “We’re growing old, Mycroft.”  
  
“Hardly,” Mycroft says, but he knows it’s true. His brother is old enough to have died already many times, and Mycroft himself has aged significantly in the last year, thinking he was all that was left. Thinking he would never stand so close to anyone ever again.  
  
Sherlock looks him in the eye. It’s still the same man in there, a near reflection of himself, still impetuous, imperious, intellectual, everything he’s always been, but there’s now something new – a new spark of humanity, of humility. Mycroft feels again the same flush of embarrassment, of over-intimacy. He steps away from the door, ready to be done with this, ready to go back to his safe world and the small efforts he makes to keep it that way.  
  
Sherlock stops him with a hand on his elbow. “You I can just say this to, because you won’t require proof. I won’t leave again.”  
  
Mycroft turns and looks at him again. He sees the graying hair, the wrinkles at the corners of eyes, the way it hurts him to try and smile, and he nods. “That is – good.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
Sherlock is waiting on something, and Mycroft, as always, as ever, will try. He will always try for Sherlock. “I should – I should be most glad if you wouldn’t,” he murmurs, and Sherlock nods. He grips Mycroft’s arm a bit more firmly for a moment, and then he releases it. This is the most contact they’ve had since they were children, Mycroft thinks. My, they have grown up.  
  
They walk back to the parlor in silence. Mycroft sends the housekeeper to lock the study; he sets the velvet box on the mantle. Sherlock is standing in the doorway, ready to make his escape. “Take an umbrella, if you won’t let me call a car,” Mycroft says.  
  
“I don’t need –“ Sherlock starts, and then he pauses. A smirk, so familiar, lifts his mouth. “Yes, thank you,” he says.  
  
“Good god, you are really trying, aren’t you?”  
  
“Every day so far,” Sherlock says. “I’m born again, you know.”  
  
Mycroft laughs. “Is it too much to expect you for dinner now and then?”  
  
“John likes lamb,” Sherlock says. “Is your new housekeeper up to that, or is she simply something nice to look at?”  
  
“Tut tut, Sherlock,” Mycroft says, and hands over his second-best umbrella. “Do try not to die on the way home.”  
  
“Right,” Sherlock says, and with that, he is gone.  
  
But not for good. Not for the worst. Mycroft stands in his parlor and studies the rain through the streetlamps, wondering what it was like to live alone for a year, away from everything and everyone you love.  
  
He glances at the box on the mantle and thinks he may already know.  
  
“Will there be anything else, sir?” the housekeeper – Miss Emerson – asks from the doorway, holding the tray with his untouched tea.  
  
Yes, he thinks. There will always be more.


End file.
